(CARICOM Secretariat, Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown, Guyana) The global financial and economic crisis is projected to pose a serious threat to the social gains that have been achieved over the last decade as it was likely to push an additional 46 million people below the poverty line over and above the 130-155 million who were there in 2008.

This was the picture painted by Mr Roger Mc Lean Senior Research Fellow/Health Economist HEU, Centre for Health Economics, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago as he made a presentation to the Opening Ceremony of the 18th Meeting of the Caribbean Community’s Council for Human and Social Development (COHSOD) in Montego Bay, Jamaica on Wednesday.

In his presentation entitled The Global Financial Crisis and its effect of delivery of Health and Educational Status in the Caribbean, he noted that the present situation came on the heels of a global food crisis and energy prices that reached unprecedented levels in 2007 and 2008.

“This means for many countries they face the dual crisis of unacceptable levels of inflation and unemployment concurrently,” he pointed out, further stating that “it has however been widely acknowledged that the full impact of the recession has not yet been felt.”

Mr McLean said “The World Bank estimates an increase of between 200,000 to 400,000 deaths annually if the crisis continues for developing countries,” he added.

As far as the Region was concerned, Mr McLean said that based on previous experience the global shocks were likely to be felt through a tightening of external financing conditions, lower demand for regional exports and a severe drop in the terms of trade. “The effects of these shocks are likely to be exacerbated by the existing and inherent volatility of Caribbean territories. This is largely driven by the small size of our economies, our dependence on exports as the key source of foreign exchange and hence our increased reliance on international trade, and the “monocrop” nature of our export sectors,” he stated.

He said the impacts were likely to manifest themselves in greater demand for social safety network and the resulting depletion in quality of life and its impact on human capital formation were likely to reinforce those structural factors that would see higher levels of poverty and deprivation in subsequent cycles for the Region.

In mitigating the effects of the crisis, Mr McLean indicated that the Health and Education sectors were key to the strategies required to respond. “If increased productivity is the key to re-energising economic growth and attaining fiscal stability, then the roles of the Health, Education and related Social Sectors are key in ensuring that our principle resource (our Human Resource) is equipped and capable of being a significant net contributor and not a net drain to the Region’s fiscal position,” he argued.

Those sectors, he said must be seen as key to the engine of growth and development and more than mere “Response Sectors” and offered three platforms upon which that response could be built - an Institutional/Information platform, an Attitudinal platform and a Fiscal platform.

Mr McLean said that these interventions were critical to ensuring that the key growth drivers were capable of bringing the required returns in the form of an enhanced, empowered and educated human resource pool that could ultimately ensure that profit making potential is maximised.

CONTACT: piu@caricom.org